Luis de Torres

Origins and early life

Luis de Torres was a Jew of Castile, born about the middle of the fifteenth century, who had served as interpreter to the governor of Murcia; his Hebrew name is given by later tradition as Yosef ben Halevi Halvri, Joseph son of Levi the Hebrew, though the contemporary documents call him only Luis de Torres.

Work and career

This fiche states plainly that he was baptized a Catholic on 2 August 1492, the day before Columbus sailed and the day the last Jews had to leave Spain under the edict of expulsion, and that the baptism was the condition of his sailing: only Christians could join the expedition. Columbus took him precisely because he was a Jew and knew Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic, the languages in which, it was believed, the Great Khan's court or the lost tribes of Israel might be addressed once the fleet reached Asia.

He landed with Rodrigo de Jerez on the north coast of Cuba on 2 November 1492 as the first embassy sent inland by Columbus, carrying a letter for the emperor of China; the two men found no emperor but a village of the Taíno, and reported back that the inhabitants rolled dried leaves, lit them and drank the smoke, the first European account of tobacco. His Hebrew was of no use in the Caribbean. He stayed behind at La Navidad, the settlement Columbus left on Hispaniola with thirty-nine men, and was killed with the rest of the garrison before Columbus returned in 1493.

He is remembered as the first man of documented Jewish origin to set foot in the Americas, and his presence on that first voyage is a reminder that the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and the discovery of the New World are events of the very same summer.